1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to compress-and-forward relaying where a relay node is unable to decode information forwarded by a source node but the relay node estimates what the source node might have sent and forwards this estimate to a destination node.
2. Description of the Related Art
The need for soft information forwarding arises in some practical scenarios, all of which are characterized by the property of forwarding information with unknown reliability. This may happen when the received information is received at a relay node over a noisy channel, when the received information is uncoded and/or the received information is coded at a rate higher than the capacity of a receiving channel. In such scenarios, converting the received soft information to hard information leads to error propagation. Thus, there is a need for an intermediate/relay node to directly process the received soft information probabilistically to produce soft signal values for retransmission and for a system and method of compressing and forwarding soft information without decoding the information.